3,433 research outputs found
Detecting multiple authorship of United States Supreme Court legal decisions using function words
This paper uses statistical analysis of function words used in legal
judgments written by United States Supreme Court justices, to determine which
justices have the most variable writing style (which may indicated greater
reliance on their law clerks when writing opinions), and also the extent to
which different justices' writing styles are distinguishable from each other.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS378 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Friendly Precedent
This Article explores which legal precedents judges choose to support their decisions.When describing the legal landscape in a written opinion, which precedent do judges gravitate toward? We examine the idea that judges are more likely to cite friendly precedent. A friendly precedent, here, is one that was delivered by Supreme Court Justices who have similar political preferences to the lower court judges delivering the opinion. In this Article, we test whether a federal Court of Appeals panel is more likely to engage with binding Supreme Court precedent when the political flavor of that precedent is aligned with the political composition of the panel.
We construct a unique dataset of 591,936 citations to United States Supreme Court decisions by the federal Courts of Appeals in 127,668 unanimous decisions from 1971 to 2007. We find that judges gravitate toward friendly precedent. The political composition of a panel consistently influences which binding precedent is cited in the written opinion. All Republican-appointed panels gravitate toward the most conservative precedent; all Democratic-appointed panels gravitate toward the most liberal precedent and unfavorably cite the most conservative precedent. This result is notable because it provides strong evidence that judges, when reasoning their decisions, have different conceptions of binding precedent
Offer-of-Judgment Rules and Civil Litigation: An Empirical Study of Automobile Insurance Litigation in the East
The Visible Trial: Judicial Assessment as Adjudication
Only a small fraction of lawsuits ends in trial—a phenomenon termed the “vanishing trial.” Critics of the declining trial rate see a remote, increasingly regressive judicial system. Defenders see a system that allows parties to resolve disputes independently. Analyzing criminal and civil filings in federal district court for the forty-year period from 1980 to 2019, we confirm a steady decline in the absolute and relative number of trials. We find, however, this emphasis on trial rate obscures courts’ vital role and ignores parties’ goals. Judges adjudicate disputes directly by ruling or effectively through other assessments of the parties’ cases. Even as their absolute and relative numbers decrease, trials remain the most visible event in trial courts. The visible trial serves effectively as a guide star. Our findings warrant a fundamental reconceptualization of litigation as primarily about educating parties rather than about trying cases. The assessment theory proposed here views adjudication as a continuous, information-disclosing process that is guided by but not destined for trial. Our evaluation and expectations of the modern justice system should be focused on the effectiveness of judges as teachers
Chief Judges: The Limits of Attitudinal Theory and Possible Paradox of Managerial Judging
Grutter v. Bollinger is familiar to American lawyers, academics, and law students as the Supreme Court decision allowing the consideration of race in law school admissions.1 Grutter\u27s procedural history is nearly as noteworthy as its substantive holding. The University of Michigan Law School, after losing in federal district court, appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Three Democratic appointees were assigned to the panel: Judges Karen Nelson Moore and Martha Craig Daughtrey, who had heard an earlier interlocutory appeal, and Chief Judge Boyce Martin, who replaced the designated district judge from the earlier panel. The white applicant reqiiested that the entire court, rather than a panel, hear the case. The Sixth Circuit granted the en banc petition. A closely divided en banc court reversed the district court in an opinion authored by Martin.
Normally, that is all we would know about the process by which the Sixth Circuit decided the case. But something highly unusual happened. Judge Danny Boggs included with his dissenting opinion a five-page procedural appendix detailing intracourt machinations and accusing the Chief Judge of manipulating procedures to affect the outcome. Boggs alleged that Martin violated circuit rules by assigning himself, rather than a randomly selected judge, to the three-judge panel. This assertion alone does not seem very significant-the case was decided, after all, by the en banc court. Boggs\u27s more pointed accusation was that Martin engineered the en banc voting process to ensure a court balanced in favor of the law school. When the white student petitioned for an en banc hearing, eleven active judges sat on the Sixth Circuit; two of those judges had expressed their intent to take senior status.10 Martin circulated the petition after both judges had taken senior status, making them ineligible to participate. Judge Alice Batchelder responded by writing an internal memo to her colleagues contending that Martin delayed the vote on the white student\u27s request for a hearing en banc until judges opposed to affirmative action took senior status. Boggs\u27s dissent made public those accusations, a fact that one colleague called shameful, and another embarrassing and incomprehensible.
Accusations like those made in Grutter are consistent with the attitudinal theory of judicial decisionmaking. Attitudinal theory proffers that judges are political actors who make decisions that will maximize their policy preferences. Developed primarily by political scientists, this approach has gained increasing currency in legal scholarship. If the theory is an accurate account of any judicial action on the courts of appeals, we would expect, at a minimum, to see evidence in the behavior of chief judges, who have more opportunities than other circuit judges to achieve policy goals. Chief judges may behave attitudinally in exercising their formal powers as well as their informal authority and influence
Measuring Justice in State Courts: The Demographics of the State Judiciary
For most individuals and organizations, state courts--especially state trial courts-are the law for all effective purposes. State courts are America\u27s courts. But, we know surprisingly little about state court judges despite their central and powerful role in lawmaking and dispute resolution. This lack of information is especially significant because judges\u27 backgrounds have important implications for the work of courts. The characteristics of those who sit in judgment affect the internal workings of courts as well as the external perception of those courts and judges. The background of judges will influence how they make decisions and can impact the public\u27s acceptance of those decisions. We aim to address this knowledge gap by collecting demographics on state judges in every state. We discovered, however, that the task is extraordinarily difficult due to many factors, including a lack of transparency and an abundant complexity in our state court systems. In this Article, we describe and evaluate the difficulty of studying state courts and the importance of continued efforts to do so. We explain a variety of methods to overcome some of the research challenges. We then lay out our findings on state court demographics. The process and outcome of our project can inform study of the judiciary and its place in our political system. We hope too they will encourage and facilitate future empirical study of state courts
Chief Judges: The Limits of Attitudinal Theory and Possible Paradox of Managerial Judging
Chief judges wield power. Among other things, they control judicial assignments, circulate petitions to their colleagues, and manage internal requests and disputes. When exercising this power, do chiefs seek to serve as impartial court administrators or do they attempt to manufacture case outcomes that reflect their political beliefs? Because chiefs exercise their power almost entirely outside public view, no one knows. No one sees the chief judge change the composition of a panel before it is announced or delay consideration of a petition for en banc review or favor the requests of some colleagues while ignoring those of others. Chiefs do exercise one very public power, however. Chiefs decide when to step down and return to active service, and because their dates of departure determine who will succeed them, they decide who their successors will be. If chiefs are impartial administrators, their departure decisions should not lead systematically to successors who share their political beliefs; if, by contrast, they are purely political actors, their departures should be timed to ensure like-minded successors. Relying on a database that includes all chief circuit judges, we test a strategic departure theory of chief judge tenure. We find little evidence of political motivations. We find instead that chief judges serve shorter terms as dockets grow larger; thus, overwhelming workload may prevent judges from using the office to further policy goals
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